Normandy: William I (1066-87), William II (1087-1100), Henry I (1100-35)
Blois: Stephen (1135-54)
Plantagenet: Henry II (1154-89 “Anjou”), Richard I (1189-99), John (1199-1216), Henry III (1216-72), Edward I (1272-1307), Edward II (1307-27), Edward III (1327-77), Richard II (1377-99, deposed by Bolingbroke, i.e. Henry IV)
Lancaster: Henry IV (1399-1413), Henry V (1413-22), Henry VI (1422-61)
York: Edward IV (1461-83), Edward V (1483), Richard III (1483-85, killed at Bosworth by Henry Tudor)
Tudor: Henry VII (1485-1509), Henry VIII (1509-47), Edward VI (1547-53), Mary (1553-58), Elizabeth I (1558-1603)
Stuart: James I (1603-25), Charles I (1625-49, beheaded by Cromwell’s forces, 1649)
Interregnum: Council of State (1649), Protectorate (1653), Oliver Cromwell (1653-58), Richard Cromwell (1658-59)
Stuart: Charles II (1660-85, the Restoration), James II (1685-88, abdicated and fled to the Continent), William III and Mary (1689-1702, the Glorious Revolution of 1688), Anne (1702-14)
Hanover: George I (1714-27), George II (1727-60), George III (1760-1820), George IV (1820-30), William IV (1830-37), Victoria (1837-1901)
Saxe-Coburg: Edward VII (1901-10)
Windsor: George V (1910-1936), Edward VIII (1936, abdicated), George VI (1936-52), Elizabeth II (1952-present)
Shakespeare’s Focus on Two Periods in the History Plays:
Setting the Stage for the Hero-King Henry V: Richard II / Henry IV Parts 1, 2 / Henry V.
Wars of the Roses, Setting the Stage for the Tudors: Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, 3 | Richard III.
General Aims of Shakespeare’s History Plays
Shakespeare didn’t invent the dramatic genre we call “history plays”; it was a phenomenon of the 1590s, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is one fine example. But there wasn’t a long theatrical tradition to draw from; a growing sentiment of nationalism in Early Modern England probably led to the flourishing of this genre – the English apparently wanted to see their history reflected back to them, and Shakespeare was happy to oblige. But we should give him his due: if he didn’t invent the history play, it’s still true that English history retains its fascination for us moderns in large part because certain lucky kings and queens had a great dramatist to help them strut their stuff.
Consider a modern example: while JFK was a complex, intelligent man whose presidency was already consequential by the time he was cut down in November 1963, does anybody think he would exercise the continuing fascination that he does without the “Camelot” legend woven around him by his family, his advisors, and above all by his wife Jackie? She is the one who made her husband’s funeral an unforgettable national event – something for the ages. The business of life in D.C. and of governing the country went on with cold dispatch almost from the moment John Kennedy’s body was flown back from Texas to the Capitol: Lyndon Johnson was sworn in on the plane. But the Camelot legend ensured that “JFK” won’t fade into history. In an older context, Abraham Lincoln was remarkable enough to have been remembered no matter what, but Walt Whitman cemented his status as an American symbol with the elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
That is what Shakespeare has done for English history – Great Britain is a sophisticated little island country nowadays, not a great power like America, but to this day they cast a huge shadow over us: who is going to forget Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V, or John of Gaunt, Buckingham, Clarence, and any number of other great nobles, now that they have been so well memorialized? America has a fine history, but as yet lacks the Brits’ long record of colorful rulers and events that Shakespeare borrowed for his history plays.
Are those plays history in the sense of “objectively true narration”? No. While there’s a factual basis for WS’s histories and they certainly render the grand sweep of English history, the playwright does a great deal of rearranging and telescoping of events, and the sources from which he drew (Holinshed’s Chronicles chief among them) were not objective in the first place – they read more like what Winston Churchill (himself a fine writer who penned A History of the English Speaking People) called the right kind of account: history as it ought to have been, not as it happened down to the last detail. There’s no proof, for instance, that Richard III really ordered those famous lads in the Tower snuffed out, but it’s logical to assume that either he or his high-ranking follower Buckingham were responsible since both wanted Edward IV’s heirs out of the way. Shakespeare’s play, in accordance with the Tudor bias against the Yorkist Richard III, casts this conviction as a moral imperative, an “ought.”
Aristotle sets the precedent in his Poetics that historians are at a disadvantage with respect to poets because they, unlike poets, are bound to represent the ugly and sometimes chaotic scenes of actual history. We know that sometimes the bad guys win and the good guys lose; things don’t always or even usually happen in an ethically satisfying or even coherent manner. History is the record of modern life, and it’s often a mess. Aristotle wisely points out that “the difference [between the historian and the poet] is that the former relates things that have happened, the latter things that may happen.” For that reason, he suggests, “poetry is a more philosophical and more serious thing than history; poetry tends to speak of universals, history of particulars” (1451b). So if we like that line of thinking, poets are free to give us an intelligible and, at least at times, morally satisfying representation of historical events and personages: they are at liberty to construct recognizable scenes from chaotic events, and to derive ethical and intellectual clarity from the welter of motivations that have driven the great men and women of history. Shakespeare’s history is at base teleological in that it leads us to the rightness of Queen Elizabeth I’s Tudor reign: all roads lead to Gloriana, the real-life Faery Queen celebrated by Edmund Spencer.
None of this is to say that Shakespeare gives us “history for dummies,” tales so black-and-white in their simplification that they insult our intelligence. In fact, if you read widely enough in his histories, what you’ll find is that the playwright manages to do two things at once: one, pay tribute to the muddiness of history and the complexity of historical agents, and two, give us a sense that it all still adds up to something, that there are some lessons to be learned about ethics and power from this pageant of people and deeds. This accomplishment is apparent in a few plays we don’t have time to study, but that are among Shakespeare’s best engagements with English history: let’s begin with some information about the Wars of the Roses and then briefly examine Richard III.
The Wars of the Roses Period: Setting the Tudor Stage with the Reign and Demise of Richard III
The Tudor Era begins with Henry VII (1485-1509), victor over the last Yorkist king, Richard III (1483-85) at Bosworth Field; it continues through the reigns of Henry VIII (1509-47), Edward VI (1547-53), Mary (1553-58), and ends with Elizabeth I (1558-1603).
Henry VII put an end to the Wars of the Roses, a period of late-feudal dynastic strife between the descendants of the Angevin Plantagenet line’s Edward III (1327-77) stretching from 1455 to Henry VII’s ascension and even a few years after that, to 1487. In essence, the throne was tossed back and forth between the Houses of Lancaster and York (branches of the old Plantagenet line), with the incompetent Lancastrian Henry VI (son of Henry V, victor of Agincourt in October, 1415) ruling from 1422-61, and Yorkist Richard III getting rid of the heirs of his deceased brother and fellow Yorkist Edward IV (1461-83), who had defeated Henry VI, to rule in his own right for three fitful years. Finally, Henry, Earl of Richmond, an exiled member of the Welsh Tudor clan, married Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York to unite the two great houses. This Henry VII is the grandfather of Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabeth I.
So the recent political past had been one of considerable strife and instability, with great nobles traversing England and at times treating the people with as little respect as foreign invaders might. The larger historical background places the English strife as the immediate aftermath of the European Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between the House of Anjou (the Plantagenets, that is) and the House of Valois for the throne of France with the extinction of the direct Capetian line after French kings Philip V (1316-22) and Charles IV (1322-28). The House of Valois, though at great cost, succeeded by 1453 in expelling the English claimants from France, so Henry V’s victory at Agincourt was short-lived and his son failed to hold the lands previously secured. The English couldn’t sustain their larger territorial ambitions on the Continent, and withdrew to their own island. From that territory they would eventually enter the world scene as an impressive naval and commercial empire.
Biography is the easiest way to learn about history – dry descriptions of battles and analyses of treaties aren’t exciting, but the people behind them are often fascinating. Shakespeare starts from that insight, and the best of his history plays are vehicles for the stellar personalities of the English monarchs. Richard III seems much more gripping in this regard than its early companion Wars of the Roses plays, 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI. Richard of Gloucester, at least as Shakespeare paints him (thereby melodramatizing the already biased narrations of the Tudor chroniclers), was a charismatic monster somewhat like our modern fictional predator and scourge of the free-range rude, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It’s this strange charm that Shakespeare makes the center of the play. Let’s watch a very brief segment from an excellent modern production in which Ian McKellen plays Richard of Gloucester and gets this quality just right. [SHOW CLIP – 1.2 in which Richard woos Anne Neville, wife of Henry VI’s heir Prince Edward]. As Richard himself asks, “Was ever woman in such humour woo’d?” Shakespeare, speaking through Richard’s boast, flaunts his own dramatic abilities in pulling off such a stunt worked up from the chronicles. The courtship scene is as unrealistic as anything we can imagine, but it works as drama: we can easily understand that the vulnerable Anne was buffeted about by ruthless dynastic forces, so seeking safety in a powerful man makes sense, and one can’t help but give Richard high marks for audacity in so enthusiastically seeking the hand of the woman whose princely husband he has just murdered. Her husband Edward was in fact killed at Tewkesbury in 1471, and Richard married Anne in mid-1472, so the remarriage happened quickly, but not practically the day Edward died, as Shakespeare represents it. There is still over a decade remaining in the reign of Richard’s brother Edward IV, too, so the play has greatly telescoped events originally spanning a few decades into what seems to theater-goers only months, or even weeks.
But Richard’s dynamic personality isn’t all the play gets right, at least in dramatic terms: there’s also the tangled web of relations and loyalties amongst the various characters to cover, and here there seems to be considerable historical truth in the portrayals. Shakespeare’s George, Duke of Clarence (Richard’s older brother) is given a sensitive, riveting speech about a nightmare he had – one that obliquely warns him that his brother Richard isn’t as friendly towards him as he pretends to be – but Shakespeare takes care to remind us that Clarence had once upon a time been a supporter of the embattled Henry VI and Warwick the Kingmaker against the current King Edward IV, before switching sides when that proved convenient. Neither do the other main characters escape critical portrayal – details aside, they appear as the men and women of fierce ambition, resentment, and divided loyalties that they were in life. To an extent, this is true even of the play’s Tudor hero, Richmond, who takes the crown from Richard in 1485 and becomes Henry VII, an icon of early English nationalism of the sort Queen Elizabeth I would come to depend on during her reign (1558-1603). Henry Earl of Richmond is certainly contrasted in a stark manner to the villainous Richard of Gloucester, but he’s still a human being, not a god or an angel. By Shakespeare’s own day, the chivalric ideals, the feudal loyalties, of older times had disappeared, but in Richard III the playwright brings them to life well at the point of their final disintegration. I’m suggesting by the above that in spite of the melodramatic quality of Richard III and its clear-cut contrast between hero Henry and rascal Richard, there’s no lack of sophistication or ambivalence, so in that broad sense the play is true to history. Shakespeare always gets human nature right, however much license he takes with the chronological unfolding of history.
But in the end, we must emphasize the both-and quality of the history plays and not insist too heavily on the tribute they pay to the maelstrom of historical confusion, as if Shakespeare were anachronistically channeling postmodern sentiments and expectations. Richard III’s mastery is short-lived, and the medieval-style moral pattern reinforced by this play is never in doubt. Richard’s own words suggest the reason for his speedy failure as a king: “I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. / Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye” (4.2.63-5). However courageous and crafty Richard may be, he has become the creature of his own evil deeds, doomed to repeat them with less and less control over the outcome, until disaster can no longer be kept at bay. Only his death at the hands of Henry Tudor, and Henry’s marriage as Henry VII to the Yorkist King Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth, will put an end to the bloody chaos of The Wars of the Roses. The lesson of Richard III seems starkly Augustinian: sin begets sin, and free will negates itself thereby, so that all of Richard’s cunning schemes and furious action come to nothing. Shakespeare’s “speaking picture” (Philip Sidney’s phrase) of incarnate evil, like all evil, ultimately has no substance, no staying power – those who try to harness evil as the vehicle of their own advancement end up destroying themselves. That’s why Richard III isn’t a true tragedy but is instead a brilliant melodrama looking back to the late medieval period of English history.
Back to an Earlier Time: Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V
If Richard III partly showed us a consummate Machiavellian ruler going about his murderous business, Richard II serves as a prime example of Shakespeare’s interest in what happens when those who are the center of the whirlwind that is English history don’t know how to use the power they have. Richard II, in Shakespeare’s casting, is a wicked man but also a doomed poet-king who philosophizes about and dramatizes his downfall even as it is happening to him. The following passage from 3.2 speaks for itself as an indicator of Richard Plantagenet’s mindset; Richard is in the midst of preparations for battle with Henry Bolingbroke, who has returned from the Continent with an army to claim first the rights he lost when Richard stripped him of his inheritance from his father John of Gaunt (the third son of Edward III), and then the throne itself:
AUMERLE. Where is the Duke my father with his power?
KING RICHARD. No matter where--of comfort no man speak.
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
…………………………………………
For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos'd, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd,
Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd,
All murder'd-for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?
CARLISLE. My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes,
But presently prevent the ways to wail.
Richard II is a master of words, but not a good ruler. As Carlisle tries to tell him, men in his position haven’t the luxury of sitting around and poeticizing: their task is to act quickly and resolutely. Chairman Mao famously said that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun.” That was largely true of the English monarchs in the time period Shakespeare covers – violence was never far from the throne, either in its getting or its defending. “Use it or lose it” is the first lesson of political power: if you are entrusted with authority and fail to use it, someone else will, whether their claim to wield that power is textbook legitimate or not. Legitimate is as legitimate does. (I suppose all the English rulers knew that primogeniture, legitimacy, and allied concepts were partly fictions.) I can’t do better than quote il brutto, Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, from the 1966 Sergio Leone classic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: “When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk.” Ultimately, what we can draw from Richard II is Shakespeare’s interest in the pitiless dynamics of royal power; his concern for the necessarily close relationship between rhetoric and political action; and the fundamental need of a ruler to understand his own people. Richard II failed in all three regards, and so he fell to the ruthless and efficient claim to the throne advanced by Henry Bolingbroke.
From 1 and 2 Henry IV, I have time only to mention that the plays show the comic, redemptive disposition of time we have discussed in relation to Twelfth Night. Henry Bolingbroke or Henry IV was a powerful and competent man, but in Shakespeare’s handling, he is a guilt-ridden stage-setter for his prodigal son Prince Hal, who will in Henry V be represented as a great warrior-king and an icon of early English nationalism. Much of the two plays is taken up with Shakespeare’s interest in the playful, redemptive development of Hal from his troubled youth to maturity. The young man has time enough to run with the jovial but morally dangerous Sir John Falstaff and his crowd, even turning the tables on the old knight when he robs Sir John of the spoils he himself had won during an earlier robbery at Gadshill. What Hal learns during that long interval is not only who he is but who his subjects are – unlike Richard II, he is not an alien in his own land, but the living symbol of England whose power comes from the fact that he understands the kingdom he must govern and lead to victory in war; Hal understands as well that while being a king involves game-playing or role-playing, this “play” is no joke: it’s done in a spirit of deadly earnestness. It’s hard to miss the emphasis on the burdens of kingship in the Henry IV and Henry V plays.
Ultimately, the comic spirit or pattern pervades this set, and in fact it applies to all of Shakespeare’s history plays – even the ones labeled “tragedies” like Richard II, Richard III, and 3 Henry VI. That’s because in the future lies the teleological endpoint of Elizabeth’s Tudor reign and the Stuart line of James I, the two rulers during whose time Shakespeare lived and wrote: all of the events the playwright represents, we might say, were necessary to make the present possible, and all of the rulers and the great nobles were in that sense actors in a pageant larger than they could have comprehended. It seems that true tragedy is only possible when the universe crumbles around the characters who fall to their ruin, or at least it is shaken and shown to be fundamentally indifferent or even hostile to human aspirations. With the felicitous Tudor/Stuart endpoint of Shakespeare’s own day always in an audience’s mind, the tragic dimension cannot have been the primary one in his history plays; those plays essentially represent a comic or happy swath of time.
